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According to monitoring systems run by Bath, England-based security consulting firm Netcraft, The SCO Groups Web site had been inaccessible since late Wednesday.
SCO said on Tuesday that it had been hit with distributed denial-of-service attack and offered a reward for the arrest and conviction of the worms author.
Netcrafts data showed several short-lived outages on Tuesday and then a long continuing break on Wednesday evening. SCO was unavailable for comment.
The distributed denial-of service attack against the Lindon, Utah-based SCO from various versions of the MyDoom worm isnt scheduled to execute until February 1. However, analysts pointed out that users of an infected computer could easily invoke the DDoS action by moving the system clock forward. This idea was suggested by some participants in a recent Slashdot thread.
“During the past ten months SCO has been the target of several DDOS attacks,” said Darl McBride, SCOs CEO in a statement released Tuesday.
“This one [MyDoom] is different and much more troubling, since it harms not just our company, but also damages the systems and productivity of a large number of other companies and organizations around the world,” McBride continued, “The perpetrator of this virus is attacking SCO, but hurting many others at the same time. We do not know the origins or reasons for this attack, although we have our suspicions. This is criminal activity and it must be stopped,” McBride said.
Concerned over the reports on open-source boards that cheered the DDoS attacks, longtime open-source heavyweight Bruce Perens weighed in on the matter in an open letter to the Linux community on Tuesday. “Show others by example that our side always takes the high road. When they see a low-road sort of action like denial-of-service, spam, or stock fraud, theyll know who to blame. Remember that your actions count. You are ambassadors of our community,” Perens said in the letter.